Song Thrush

Today's the day ............................. to be under threat

Always good to see this chap in the garden - not least because song thrushes are very partial to a bit of tasty snail.

Because we see quite a lot of them around here, I was quite surprised to read that the song thrush is red-listed as a bird of serious conservation concern.  Long-term monitoring carried out by the British Trust for Ornithology shows that the population in England declined by more than 50 per cent between 1970 and 1995. This decline was most pronounced on farmland, where the population decreased by about 70 per cent.  Mortality is high and its causes many and varied. Only 20 per cent of fledglings and 60 per cent of adults survive to breed the following spring. 

And even although there has been a partial recovery in numbers during the last decade, it would be bad news indeed if we lost this delightful garden song bird ......................